New Feministing Initiative: Hey, Let's All Grow Unibrows

You may have heard of “Movember”, a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for prostate cancer and other men’s health issues, such as depression.

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Thus, inspired by an article on the popularity of the unibrow in Tajikistan sent in by reader Jess (thanks, Jess!), I hereby declare that the current month shall heretofore be known as….DECEMBROW.

Decembrow is, of course, all about the brow. Specifically, the unibrow.

While women in the U.S. generally rock two groomed brows, I say let’s be inspired by Movember and take this opportunity to let our facial hair grow…for a cause.

This month, I encourage you to grow in your unibrow, or, if you don’t have one, use an herbal remedy or a pencil to fake it (as they do in Tajikistan), for the cause of your choice.

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Challenging cultural norms about women’s facial hair while raising money for a good cause? Now that’s just the kind of thing that gets me in the holiday spirit.

How to unpack the stupid? Here's my attempt.

1. This idea that culture is in fact a cultural construct and hence subject to changes in taste and largely arbitrary is the sort of thing that gobsmacks a fourth grader when she realizes it for the first time. Such a simple point should not be continuing to Shock and Awe supposedly adult women who presume to write professionally.

Yes, I suppose we could change our cultural preference from two brows to one. But why should we? If we begin with the premise that the two-brow preference is arbitrary, fine, but then why should we expend effort to displace it with another arbitrary, constructed preference?

The feminist answer, I guess, is that we wish to champion women's beauty in all its forms but... really, isn't beauty the most superficial of traits? Why is such outsized effort being amassed to change the trivial?

2. I enjoy how this girl can't even be bothered to chose a charity this great effort is supposedly in service of. Just choose one, she says. To increase awareness of it. I'm not sure how you can increase awareness of a charity with a unibrow in the first place, but I'm doubly uncertain about how you can raise awareness of a charity when you don't even agree beforehand what this movement is supposed to raise awareness of.

I guess people will have to specifically ask each girl flaunting a Cro-Magnon unibrow what the hell she's doing. Then she can tell them, proudly, "I'm raising awareness for government-provided pet psychiatry."

3. It's absolutely childish that one single man-only project (a trivial one, that I never heard of) has to be matched by the feminists, even when they can't think of anything useful to do. The men doing this at least had a specific goal in mind; a trivial step towards that goal, yes, but a goal nonetheless. This Feministing writer can't even wait to think of a proper goal before rushing out with her if-boys-are-doing-it-we-must-do-it-too response.

4. Whenever a leftist is undertaking a vanity project -- and I mean that as literally as possible; this crap is pure vanity, pure attention-seeking, pure personal brand-differentiation -- but cannot come up with any tangible, real-world benefit to their actions but still wishes to cast it as somehow enobling or altruistic, she claims it's "challenging" this or that.

Note how vague a verb that is in any context except boxing or MMA. "Challenging" really doesn't mean anything. She doesn't claim to be "changing" cultural preferences -- that would be an insane boast. She's not changing anything.

All she's doing is "forcing people to confront" their own preferences. Like, someone sees her with a unibrow, thinks "That looks dreadful," then doesn't think again about it. Mission accomplished.

5. Gun to my head, I would guess there is a very high correlation between lives without any meaning and these constant, thrashing attempts to imbue trivial actions with deeper meaning. Show me a person with skin in the game -- someone who derives meaning from family, faith, work, or duty to country -- and I'll show you someone who most likely doesn't feel the need to assign grand meaning to the act of letting his appearance go to hell.

6. I'm sure the unibrow is all the rage in Tajikistan, but a) this isn't Tajikistan, and b), why not agitate the Tajiks to broaden their own sense of what can be beautiful in a woman by including the "diversity" of two eyebrows?

7. The unibrow? Are you kidding? Here's how unattractive the unibrow is considered by those who share western cultural norms: The unibrow is sooo unnattractive that 90% of all men did not bother to see Frida, a biopic of unibrow enthusiast Frida Kolko (pictured above), even though that movie promised (IIRC) Salma Hayek fully naked and getting it on with a chick.

Nope, I never saw it. And yes, I am a fan of Salma Hayek. But the unibrow? Pass. The unibrow so challenged my conception of female beauty I never bothered to even record Frida when it was on HBO, so I could fast-forward to the good parts.

That crap out of the way, here's the funny, not from me, but from reader David McC, who offers this list of rejected Feministing let's-give-meaning-to-our-empty-lives-by-renaming-months proposals: